Invision Power Board (IP.Board, IPB) is a state-of-the-art forum software with a better security reputation than vBulletin, which we used to use. As vBulletin 4 approached EOL and clearly showed its age, we were considering how to proceed: with vBulletin 5 or something else entirely. The choice, as you can clearly see, has been made.

Some of you have already asked why we didn’t choose the software du jour XenForo. This is due to a few reasons:

peer, our new technical administrator, has worked with XenForo in the past and repeatedly hit its (and peer’s) limits.

We had an IP.Board license readily available, whereas we’d have had to purchase XenForo separately.

Looking at the track record of vBulletin for security, and seeing how XenForo is mostly the old vBulletin guys starting a new project, there were security concerns.

If you have any questions about using Invision Power Board, please create a thread in the Forums Feedback forum.

Staff Changes

Due to concerns in real life, @Alpha has decided to no longer be the primary administrator. This means he’ll still be around, but will be less active than usual. We thank him for his hard work maintaining Project Pokémon, and his absence is a loss to Project Pokémon. Helping to fill his place will be myself and @peer, who is our new technical administrator.

The hackers deleted a large quantity of data, including some of our more recent backups. As a result, we have lost one year of forum attachments and a up to a few hours of forum posts. The good news is that @theSLAYER, our event moderator, has stockpiled generations of events and several programs, so the situation could have been far worse. @peer is looking into setting up automatic offsite backups to prevent this from happening again.

Hashed passwords are still in the wild. We strongly encourage you to immediately change your passwords here and everywhere you’ve used the same passwords. While hashed passwords are not supposed to be reversible (i.e. your password shouldn’t be able to be derived from the hash), vBulletin’s hashing algorithm is very weak, making it that much more important you change your passwords.

The Future

Let’s not let the data loss get us down; it’s time to move forward. With the recent release of Pokémon Sun and Moon, there still cool things to discover, technical details to be researched, and ROM hacks to be created. (Not to mention there’s some cool stuff going on in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon side of things - more on this later.)

As a reminder, the User-Submitted News forum was introduced a few weeks ago to help bring attention to things such as updates to Save and ROM editors, ROM hacks, and other cool stuff worthy of the front page. If you know of anything noteworthy, post it there so it has a chance to be seen by all!

Closing Statements

We would like to, once more, apologize for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our staff, create a thread in the appropriate feedback forum, or ask in our IRC channel.

We're working on restoring everything from the event gallery. We have all the files, it just takes time to put them in the Downloads section. A front-page announcement will be posted when we're finished.